According to a 2014
report on online harassment
by Pew Research Center,
73% of adult internet users have witnessed someone being harassed online,
while 40% have experienced it themselves. As is expected, the majority (66%)
of those who have personally faced harassment have had their most recent
incident occur on a social media platform. And even though all popular social
media platforms provide tools for flagging negative content, only 8.8% of the
victims have actually considered making use of these provisions. Essentially,
passive techniques to curb the propagation of negative content like flagging
have not proved to be very effective.

Combating negative content in real time

The aim of this project is to develop tools that can limit the creation of negative
content. Instead of relying on passive techniques, we utilize artificial intelligence
to actively intervene and restrain users from posting content that is hateful, abusive,
racist, sexist or toxic in any other way. Currently, this is done with browser extensions
that trigger warnings when users try to post content that is deemed negative by the
artificial intelligence. Users can choose to react to these warnings or simply
dismiss them. We recordthe reactions in order to analyze the performance of the
artificial intelligence.

Here is a demo (contents strictly for illustration purposes):

Backed by the state of the art deep neural network models

The artificial intelligence that powers this project comprises our state of the
art methods in negative content detection. We employ natural language
processing techniques based on deep neural networks to prepare models that can
distinguish between negative and non-negative content with high accuracy. Since
deliberate obfuscation of words and phrases by users has posed a significant
challenge to automated detection in the past, we specifically designed our
models to be resilient to this phenomenon. All the theoretical and implementation
details of our methods will be published soon.

Always learning always improving

We provide for a simple mechanism by which you can report any negative content
that you come across.Each report that you make allows us to improve the
artificial intelligence. This way,we are able to keep up with the ever-evolving
trends in internet jargon.